Norway shooter: Ammo from U.S.

The Norwegian man who allegedly killed dozens at a kids summer camp claims he legally bought high-capacity ammunition clips by mail from the United States, prompting Capitol Hill’s leading gun-control advocate to say on Thursday that America should be ashamed such purchases aren’t against the law.

Anders Behring Breivik wrote in a 1,500-page manifesto that he bought 10 30-round ammunition clips for his .223 caliber rifle from an undisclosed, small U.S. supplier, which had acquired the clips from other suppliers. Norway forbids the sale of clips for hunting rifles that hold more than three bullets, according to Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten.

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Breivik wrote in his manifesto that while he could have purchased the high-capacity magazines in Sweden, they would have been significantly more expensive than ordering them from a U.S. supplier. He wrote that he spent $550 for the 10 clips. He also described legally buying four 30-round clips for a Glock handgun in Norway.

The Norwegian press has written extensively about how Breivik legally acquired his weapons and ammunition, but the mail-order purchase of his ammo from the United States has received little attention in the English-language press.

Breivik is charged with killing 68 people at an Utoya island summer camp run by the country’s leading political party and eight other after a bomb he set off outside the prime minister’s office in Oslo. An additional 96 people are reported injured in the July 22 attacks. Breivik’s lawyer said his client has confessed to the killings and may seek an insanity defense.

Breivik wrote that he purchased his weapons legally so he could practice with them at local firing ranges. Under a bolded heading. “How much ammo does a soldier bring to battle,” Breivik described in detail the type of ammunition clips necessary to carry out a massacre.

The sale or transfer of high-capacity gun clips containing more than 10 bullets were illegal in the United States under the 1994 assault weapons ban, but the legislation expired in 2004. After Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) was critically shot and six others killed during the January shootings outside a Tucson supermarket, Rep. Carolyn McCarthy (D-N.Y.) introduced legislation to restrict magazines to their pre-2004 level.

She said the legislation now has 109 Democratic co-sponsors. It is highly unlikely to come to a vote, let alone pass, in the GOP-controlled House.

McCarthy said the U.S. should be ashamed that its laws allowed for the ammunition that may have been used in the Norwegian massacre to be sold and shipped overseas.

“There should be a lot of shame,” she told POLITICO. “We’re sending a death warrant to other parts of the world. … Unfortunately now, internationally, it’s known that you can get here, buy your guns, buy your large magazines, and you’re not going to have any problem.”

McCarthy said eliminating high-capacity clips like those used in the Norway and Arizona shootings should be a matter of moral outrage.

“I don’t understand why people can’t have common sense,” she said. “Large magazines do not need to be part of it. The large manufacturers, they should even take a moral point of view in not selling them to ordinary citizens through the gun stores. The police and military can still use them.But I just morally think they should not look to sell them to the average citizen.”

A spokesman for the National Rifle Association did not immediately return a request for comment.

Like McCarthy, gun control advocates urged Congress to outlaw the high-capacity magazines.

“It is bad enough that our lax laws gun cause death and destruction in the streets of our own country but we must now face the fact that our domestic arms bazaar is attracting foreign terrorists and criminals,” said Josh Horwitz, the executive director of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence. “What will it take for Congress to wake up and take action?”

And Dennis Henigan, the acting president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, said the world is endangered by American gun laws.

“It now appears that not even Norwegian children at a youth camp are safe from the battlefield firepower so easily available in America,” he said. “Large-capacity assault clips are instruments of mass killing, yet federal law leaves them completely unregulated.”